For integrated pest management (IPM) and organic farming, breeding resistant varieties is one of the most eco-friendly approaches, that goes along botanicals and other different cultural practices, as the use of companion plants. Among the many pest species that invaded the whole world in the last decades, one of the most frightening is the tomato leafminer, Tuta absoluta (Meyrick) (Lepidoptera: Gelechiidae), a devastating pest of cultivated tomato worldwide. Tomato is one of the most important agricultural commodities, including the main mean of subsistence in many countries from Africa and middle East. As chemical pesticides failed to control de pest spread and led to many reports of resistant populations, alternative methods for tomato leafminer management must be quickly developed. Many of such alternatives count on a wide range of chemical compounds. The chemical compounds most often responsible for “constitutive resistance”, synthetized by tomato are methyl-ketones (2-tridecanone), sesquiterpenes (zingiberene), and acyl sugars (acylglucose and acylsucrose) while the chemical compounds produced by other plants, used as isolated substances or mixtures, which have antifeedant, growth inhibiting, repellent, and insecticide effects, are azadirachtin, carvacrol, cinnamaldehyde, citronellal, eugenol, linalool, nicotine, pyrethrin, rotenone, thujone, thymol, α-terpineol, 1.8-cineol, etc. Many of them are already commercially available but their efficacy and use differ widely. Therefore, a deeper understanding of the resistance mechanism of solanaceous species related to chemical compounds and substances important for IPM plans developed against T. absoluta is required by the breeding programs.

Apple (Malus domestica Borkh.) is one of the most cultivated fruit trees species worldwide, its fruits being consumed not only for their organoleptic attributes, but also for their nutraceutical properties. Therefore, the genetic variability of the species is extremely important to insure a large enough pool of cultivars to accommodate consumer demands for various fruit traits, such as taste, flavor, color, shape, etc., as well as to preserve cultivars that have less desirable organoleptic properties but are resistant/tolerant to biotic and/or abiotic stress and could be good genitors for these traits. The current study presents the use of ISSR method to assess the genetic variability among seven Romanian apple cultivars from the orchard collection of University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Bucharest, Romania: ‘Florina’, ‘Remar’, ‘Ciprian’, ‘Iris’, ‘Rebra’, ‘Generos’, and ‘Redix’. In addition, the method proved to be useful in identifying closely related individual genotypes, allowing the identification and elimination of duplicates from collections, without compromising the collection’s genetic variability.

Postharvest diseases caused by fungal pathogens are one of the major causes of economic losses of horticultural fresh products during the supply chain. Undetected fungal pathogens and mycotoxins contamination caused by some of these fungi are already a concern for food safety scientists. Apple fruits decay caused by fungal infections results in considerable losses during post-harvest storage. The detection of the decay and infection type in the early stage is necessary and helpful for reducing the losses; therefore, rapid and accurate methods are needed for early detection. The polymerase chain reaction and the real-time PCR (qPCR), using specific primers, have been used for the presence and dynamics of pathogen populations during the storage. Apples are suitable substrates for fungal colonization, in storage conditions, mostly caused by Penicillium sp., Botrytis sp., Gloeosporium sp., Neofabrea sp., Monilinia sp. etc.LAMP assays, which can confirm the presence or absence of a specific pathogen in less than half an hour have been also developed for many apple pathogens, as Monilinia laxa, M. fructicola, M. fructigena and Venturia inaequalis. Therefore, this review summarizes the use of early detection by molecular biology technologies, for high sensitivity and specificity, as real time PCR (qPCR) assay and loopmediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) of DNA, in detecting and identifying apples fungal pathogens and mycotoxin producing food fungi.

Nowadays people are turning to sustainable/ecological agriculture. Romanian local varieties with valuable traits can be used to develop novel organic varieties. Nine Romanian tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) and seven pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) varieties were compared during seedling emergence in growth chamber and greenhouse conditions. The aim of this study was to observe the variation of several emergence indicators among the varieties of the same species under the same growing conditions, differences that can be correlated with genotype variation in further genotyping research, with the final goal of using these results as a basis for genotype-assisted breeding programs. The present survey demonstrated significant differences in the emergence indicators among the varieties studied, both in the growth chamber and in the greenhouse growing conditions. Ștefănești 24 tomato variety stood out with the longest mean emergence time, mean emergence rate, synchrony and highest uncertainty of emergence, whereas Vladimir pepper variety had the lowest values for percentage of emergence, homogeneity and uncertainty of emergence.